‘Purely Political Motives’ in Outing, Ex-Agent Says

Valerie Wilson told a House panel, My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by White House and State Department officials.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON, March 16 — Valerie Wilson finally spoke Friday, after almost four years at the silent center of a political scandal that touched Washington’s most rarefied circles of government and news media.

Now was her time to testify about the White House leaks that set the whole story in motion, the newspaper column that revealed her as an undercover C.I.A. agent, the marathon criminal investigation and the trial that convicted the vice president’s former chief of staff.

“My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior government officials in both the White House and the State Department,” Ms. Wilson testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in a hearing room packed with reporters, photographers and spectators.

She spoke at first in a quiet but insistent voice that was nearly inaudible over the crackle of three dozen camera shutters. Fumbling with the base of her microphone, Ms. Wilson looked at once nervous and bored waiting out the photographers. As she talked more, her voice seemed to gain force, volume and velocity — a confident bearing to match her appearance.

She said the security breach might have endangered agency officials but also “jeopardized and even destroyed entire networks of foreign agents, who in turn risk their own lives and those of their families to provide the United States with needed intelligence. Lives are literally at stake.”

Ms. Wilson said she had long been aware that her identity could be disclosed by foreign governments. “It was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover,” she said, and did so “from purely political motives.”

At the time, the Bush White House was in the midst of a bitter dispute with her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had charged that senior officials had willfully distorted intelligence about Iraq’s efforts to obtain uranium in Africa to bolster the case for going to war.

Ms. Wilson, whose outing led to the conviction last week of I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is reticent by nature and profession. She posed for an infamous photo shoot with Vanity Fair, which she declared Friday to be “more trouble than it was worth.”

Her instinctive quiet always seemed more pronounced next to the chronic noisemaking of her husband, the unreticent former diplomat, who was glaringly absent from Friday’s proceedings. According to a family friend who attended Friday’s hearing, Mr. Wilson was skiing in Utah with the couple’s 7-year-old twins, awaiting his wife’s arrival. Next week, the Wilsons will begin their new life at their new home in New Mexico.

But first Ms. Wilson had solemn business to dispatch with in Washington. In answer to questions from friendly Democrats on the committee, Ms. Wilson sharply disputed accounts that she had played any meaningful role in the decision to send her husband to Niger, which resulted in his report, in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times, that the White House had exaggerated intelligence that Iraq tried to buy uranium there. She also disclosed that she had made “several secret” trips abroad in the last few years to gather intelligence on unconventional weapons, which she said proved that those who said she did not have covert or undercover status when her identity was disclosed were incorrect.

Photo

Ms. Wilson leaving a packed hearing room Friday. Only 2 of the 17 Republicans on the panel showed up.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who became chairman in January, said that the purpose of the hearing was to consider legislative changes in the way the government handles information about Central Intelligence Agency employees. But the appearance seemed less a platform for legislation than for Democrats, who now control the committee, to criticize the Bush administration.

The leaking of Ms. Wilson’s name “undermined the trust and confidence with which future C.I.A. employees and sources hold the United States,” Mr. Waxman said.

The committee’s ranking Republican, Representative Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, tried at the beginning of the hearing to pre-emptively label the event as meaningless. As if to underscore his point, he was one of only two of the 17 Republicans on the committee who bothered to show up.

Mr. Davis said that the investigation by a special counsel ended without anybody being charged with knowingly leaking the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer. The disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity, he said, was unintentional. (Mr. Libby was convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the F.B.I.)

Friday’s episode, Mr. Davis added, was but a “media maelstrom,” an assessment no one quibbled with.

But that description understated the cinematographic aura that pervaded the room. Representative Lynn Westmoreland, Republican of Georgia, declared himself nervous.

“I’ve never questioned a spy before,” he said, either star-struck or sarcastic but drawing laughs either way.

Ms. Wilson replied, “I’ve never testified under oath before,” to more laughter.

Earlier, she had detailed how she felt upon learning of her outing in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak. She learned early on the morning of July 14, 2003, after her husband dropped the newspaper on their bed and said simply, “He did it.” (“He,” it was later ascertained, referred to Mr. Novak.)

“I felt I had been hit in the gut,” Ms. Wilson said.

She needed only slight coaxing from Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, to criticize President Bush. She was asked to comment on the fact that Mr. Bush had said he would fire anyone involved in the leak and that Karl Rove, the deputy chief of staff who confirmed Ms. Wilson’s identity to two reporters, is still employed at the White House. “I believe it undermines the president’s word,” she said.

She gave a detailed account of how her husband was selected for the Africa mission, saying that another agency official suggested him. “I did not recommend him, I did not suggest him, there was no nepotism involved,” she said. She agreed only to relay the idea to him, an idea she said she herself was ambivalent about because it would leave her alone with their children for a time.

The audience sat rapt, all eyes fixed on Ms. Wilson, even when congressmen were talking, as if she could vanish at any moment.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Purely Political Motives’ in Outing, Ex-C.I.A. Agent Says. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe